U.S’S Big­gest YEAR FOR SO­LAR En­ergy

Re­gard­ing the so­lar en­ergy in­dus­try, 2016 can be touted as U.S’S big­gest year till date.

No­tably, U.S in­stalled around 14,800 MW (Megawatts) of so­lar PV dur­ing 2016 with an aim to reach 42.4 GW (Gi­gawatts) of the over­all in­stalled ca­pac­ity. Sig­nif­i­cantly, this is enough to power al­most 8.3 mil­lion Amer­i­can homes. (Def­i­nitely a ma­jor progress!) It also rep­re­sents a whop­ping 95 per­cent in­crease com­pared to the pre­vi­ous record of around 7,493 MW (megawatts) in 2015. The fig­ures re­leased in the 7th an­nual re­port of so­lar em­ploy­men­tThe Na­tional So­lar Jobs Cen­sus 2016, by The So­lar Foun­da­tion shows

that the growth of so­lar ca­pac­ity is al­most dou­ble than the one seen in 2015. The So­lar Foun­da­tion is a non-profit (so­lar) ad­vo­cacy group.

As a first, so­lar ca­pac­ity of the U.S ranked as a num­ber 1 source for new elec­tric gen­er­at­ing ca­pac­ity ad­di­tion, that too on an an­nual ba­sis. As a sum to­tal, the so­lar ca­pac­ity ac­counted for about 39 per­cent of the new ca­pac­ity ad­di­tions in all the fuel seg­ments dur­ing 2016.

Abi­gail Ross Hop­per, So­lar En­ergy In­dus­tries As­so­ci­a­tion’s (SEIA) Pres­i­dent and CEO says, “What these num­bers tell you is that the so­lar in­dus­try is a force to be reck­oned with. So­lar’s eco­nom­i­cally win­ning hand is gen­er­at­ing strong growth across all mar­ket seg­ments na­tion­wide, lead­ing to more than 2,60,000 Amer­i­cans now em­ployed in so­lar.”